In the wholesale marketplace, suppliers typically control pricing. Buyers desire competition on price, and are frustrated with uncertainty about ordering at the best price amongst competing suppliers.
Buyers and vendors can have different information needs, and often times those needs may be relatively specialized, custom views of information about price data, comparative pricing, order guides, supplier databases, or price discrepancies. These unique needs may be satisfied through a query of an information database or other data storage device which can contain information about the pricing and bidding process from suppliers. The query can provide a set of results as items, such as weekly pricing and product descriptions. Many conventional data management systems may support such specialized queries of databases and other data storage devices, and may display the query results in a tabular form.
These types of queries and user interfaces can have drawbacks. For example, query results from these conventional data management systems can be time consuming to read and use. In some instances, relatively important information or other particularly relevant information in a query result may not be readily apparent or may appear later in the query results, and can often be overlooked by the buyer who is frequently ordering many different items at different quantities from multiple vendors. Wherein the different vendors sometimes package or group together products in different numbers or weight of the item (e.g. 4 lbs for $20 vs. 3 lbs $14), which requires more time for buyer to decide which vendor to order from.
Other conventional solutions, can be provided by certain data system vendors as add-on systems to an existing enterprise data management system in use at a business. Almost all businesses use multiple data management systems that may handle different aspects of pricing, inventory supply, invoice presentment, and creating purchase orders. However, data management systems typically do not handle price discrepancy comparison nor the ability to compare two or more wholesale vendors by equivalent items. Furthermore, certain conventional systems provided by data system vendors may only relate to a particular data management system used in the business, or may only show current status information. Such solutions may not integrate some or all of the data management systems used by the business, and may not provide an overall pricing comparison at individual product level and price discrepancy between a quoted price and final price paid via purchase order.